1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention generally relate to improving system utilization on a massively parallel computer system. More specifically, embodiments of the invention relate to altering the run-time characteristics of a computing job to meet system and user requirements.
2. Description of the Related Art
Powerful computers may be designed as highly parallel systems where the processing activity of thousands of processors (CPUs) is coordinated to perform computing tasks. These systems are highly useful for a broad variety of applications, including financial modeling, hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, astronomy, weather modeling and prediction, geological modeling, prime number factoring, and image processing (e.g., CGI animations and rendering), to name but a few examples.
For example, one family of parallel computing systems has been (and continues to be) developed by International Business Machines (IBM) for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) under the project name Roadrunner. The architecture of a computing system similar to that of provided to LANL provides a scalable, parallel computer that may be configured with a maximum of 3240 compute nodes. Each compute node may include two general purpose processors, four special purpose processors and memory. Thus, such a computing system may include 6480 general purpose processors and 12960 special purpose processors. The architecture has been successful and on May 25, 2008, IBM announced that such a system had reached an operational speed just over 1.026 petaflops (1026 trillion floating-point operations per second), making it the fastest computer in the world at that time.